


Chaeronea

by Violsva



Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Biracial Character, Bisexuality, Casual Sex, Colonialism, Depression, Fighting, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Pre-Canon, Slash, Swearing, Victorian Attitudes, War, and the side effects thereof
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-22
Updated: 2014-01-22
Packaged: 2018-01-09 14:48:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1147257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Violsva/pseuds/Violsva
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>For five minutes afterwards there was tenderness, a shared handkerchief, a mutual laugh at what could not be wiped entirely away, a hand on a shoulder when both of our knees were weak. Beyond that, however, once we had returned to company, there was not one secret flirtatious glance, not one ambiguous comment. There never was.</i>
</p>
<p>What Watson got up to in the army.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chaeronea

In March of 1880 a British convoy, sent for further supplies, was ambushed very close to the camp at Kandahar. I and my orderly had been attached to it in case of medical difficulties, though none were expected. Our attackers were unprepared for the expedition to be so well defended; all went well for the convoy, and would have gone so for me, as well, but I and William Murray were unhorsed and surrounded, and pulled away from the rest.

I suspect our capture was an accident, but the five men who had us made it clear they intended to take advantage of it. Murray tried reasoning with them – he had an Indian mother, and when drunk was fond of claiming he could pass as any of a dozen races of the area. However, his Pathani was apparently not as strong as he hoped, and nothing came of it.

Almost nothing; one of our captors swatted him across the face for the attempt. I grabbed the man’s wrist without thought, and twisted it behind his back. Murray fought his arms free of the man holding him and gave a left uppercut to the man’s jaw, snapping his head back. I focused on the man I held – we might have poor odds, but fighting was better than whatever hell they planned for us. We’d both heard what the Ghazis did to prisoners.

It was a dirty, no-holds-barred fight that would have been considered unsportsmanlike in a London alleyway, but the circumstances must excuse it. I shoved my captive to the ground and kicked him in the kidneys just before his friend jumped me, and the rest of it was a blur of fists and tackles and, once, teeth. They had our guns, and their own knives, but the quarters were close enough that guns were little use, and we could mostly stop them before their knives were drawn. I’d have a couple new scars, but nothing serious.

We’d been taken far enough from the convoy before we fought that when Murray and I stood up at last, victorious, our unit was out of sight behind one of the numerous rocks in the pass. We regained our weapons from the Afghanis, taking theirs as well and kicking them to make sure they stayed down, and ran for higher ground where we could get our bearings.

When we had found our way up some distance, there was no sound of pursuit, and we grinned at each other. I glanced at Murray’s face, at his straight black hair and brown skin. He saw me do it and laughed suddenly. “Christ, sir,” he said. “How the fuck’d we survive that one?”

I shook my head and leaned back against one of the mountain’s boulders, laughing as well. “My fucking God,” I said. “Jesus Christ, we’re mad.”

“Fuck yes,” said Murray, and then I was kissing him. He grabbed the back of my neck and pushed my mouth harder against his, and no one would be looking for us quite yet.

A few seconds later we were on the ground, bodies pressed together and flies open. It was far from the first time, and we knew each other’s habits well enough by now.

“Fuckin’ Christ,” Murray gasped. His thumb rubbed just at the ridge below the head of my cock, just where I wanted it.

“Oh, fuck.” I sped my hand as if I stroked myself, as if his pleasure was connected to mine.

“God,” said my friend. “God damn, that’s good. Fuck. Do that again. Fuck.”

We kept gasping profane encouragement at each other as our hands moved. At last Murray groaned, “Fuckin’ God,” and bit my neck, and I convulsed with him as his cock thrust into my hand, growing wet with his spending as it did. His hand tightened around me in reaction, and I lost any further perception for a time.

We caught sight of the convoy and returned to our roles and duties as always. For five minutes afterwards there was tenderness, a shared handkerchief, a mutual laugh at what could not be wiped entirely away, a hand on a shoulder when both of our knees were weak. Beyond that, however, once we had returned to company, there was not one secret flirtatious glance, not one ambiguous comment. There never was.

A battle somewhere I couldn’t pronounce the name of, a full shift in the crowded hospital tent, and both of us off for a rest at the same time – that was the more usual way of it. My hand wrapped around both of us together, and we shook and swore and spent in nearly perfect unison. And then we retired to our own cots and spoke no further of the matter.

Did it make us closer? A man I had never spoken to beyond requests for more towels once died for me. I gained the wound that would destroy my career by diving to save a native water-carrier whose name I didn’t know (and succeeded). Murray carried me through the lines and over treacherous terrain to safety, but he had done the same a month before for a man he despised. War makes men closer; I can’t say that sex does, whatever Plato wrote. And inverted desire seems unlikely to inspire gallantry, even if ours was only a replacement for nature.

It was not only Murray, of course, or it hadn’t been. It had started with a man in the company of medical personnel I had travelled with, in early ’79. He was a doctor as well, but with rather more experience than myself. It had not been driven by excitement then, only by lust and the long journey.

He had entered my tent at one of our more quiet campsites, one with neither tigers nor natives nearby. I had rolled over to see who it was, nearly asleep, and he’d cupped my face in his hand. I slurred his name in a question.

“Just seeing if you were awake,” he said, his hand sliding onto my neck. I focused on him properly. He was half-undressed, his collar open. He leaned forward and kissed me very lightly, tasting of gin.

“But – women,” I had said incoherently. My appetites had been healthy enough in university, and I had never really thought of anything else. I had done this at school, yes, but that was just boys’ sport, to be forgotten with age.

“No women here, are there?” he had asked.

There were women, in fact – every military movement, no matter how small or unofficial, attracts its share of camp followers. But I did not argue.

It was a relief and a comfort, in a place with little of either. No one feared court-martial, though doubtless we should have. One got to know which men would catch the underlying meaning behind a quick glance, a hand on the shoulder, a mention of the strain we were all under.

I suppose we did not think of consequences because we did not think of the future at all. In a hospital tent you don’t think farther than an hour ahead – who will survive that long, who needs immediate surgery, which cots need to be remade to hold another man. None of us thought beyond the next day, the next march, the reports of the enemy before the next battle.

Certainly I did not think of any future then, and more certainly not of any future outside of the army. And so I woke up one morning, months after Maiwand and still exhausted, to realize that I had no notion of what I might do with myself.

The battle itself was as clear in my head as if it was happening on the other side of a window. The period after my wound, of being dragged behind the lines, travel in a train of other injured men, a moment’s regained health in Peshawar, and then weeks and weeks of fever, was a blur of black and red, occasional images standing out with no context to suggest whether they had truly happened or not. I expected every morning to wake up in my tent, sound and whole and needed for another day’s work, and was amazed again when I did not.

When I was sent back to England, though the voyage was nearly intolerable, I held out hope that the destination would restore my spirits. I returned to London, where I had been happy at university, and to a rather fine hotel on the Strand, which I thought might cheer me, and then spent months in dull grey recovery, with no joy or comfort to be found.

I entertained myself with unwise and unlucky trips to gambling dens, card games and cockfights and boxing matches. But the other possibilities to be found in the same part of town drew little of my attention. My apathy for carnal affairs emphasized the greyness of my life, the lack of any high emotion even when my bets were good.

I thought of the army, like school, as something of a separate environment, cordoned off from everyday life. Therefore when I did make attempts in that direction, they were entirely with women. But it wouldn’t have mattered anyway – my encounters were almost universally unsuccessful, no matter what I tried or thought of. 

I was so very fed up with the tedium of my existence in London. I don’t mean London, perhaps, for rural stagnation would doubtless have been worse. Illness, then. I might have recovered from the remaining fever itself, without the depression of spirits on top of it. As it was, had I not met Sherlock Holmes God knows what would have happened to me.

After meeting Holmes, however, and after becoming involved in his cases and his adventures, I felt far more myself, and my appetites returned to a usual level, and their natural focus, though I felt it damnably awkward to live with a man who could know at a glance where I had been. But he was kind enough to say nothing of the matter, if he noticed. And I thought I would not care too much if he did know, even if he was entirely celibate himself. No matter what had happened in my past, I still thought myself entirely normal, entirely respectable, then.


End file.
